Supermarkets and Food Capitalism

published in Hot Potato 4

Aug 22, 2023

A collision of two older essays with some new text intertwined. Commissioned and edited by Jennifer Cunningham for Hot Potato, November 2022.

Our fridge was always understocked but never bare; bright white bread, some cans of off-brand diet cola, a margarine tub scraped bare, processed ‘ham’ slices, half a jar of light mayonnaise, a wilted iceberg lettuce. Growing up, dinner for my younger brother and I frequently consisted of “bits n bobs”, a selection of beige bitesize pieces from the freezer (potato smilies, turkey twizzlers, waffles, chicken nuggets) with some overcooked peas or chopped carrots. Our incredible mother and primary caregiver, though perpetually short on time and money, always made sure we never went without. Our family’s relatively unbalanced diet was a result of a poverty trap, illustrated by my mother’s high-skill-low-pay profession, and her reliance on highly-processed supermarket basics.

Access to nutritious food is a basic human right. Proof of how deeply unequal our current system has become is evident in the stark figures. The Cost of Living crisis, magnified during the global coronavirus pandemic by an insidious Conservative Government bent on profiting off people’s misery, the UK has become a nation of haves-and-have-nots. According to the 2019 Billionaire Britain report by The Equality Trust, “14 million people, a fifth of the population, live in poverty. Four million of these are more than 50% below the poverty line, and 1.5 million are destitute, unable to afford basic essentials”.¹ The WRAP (Waste and Resource Action Plan) 2015 reports that 4.4 million tonnes of “avoidable household food waste”, with a value of £13 billion, was thrown away in the UK that year.² Meanwhile a 2018 End Hunger UK report, ascertains “8% of adults have gone a whole day without eating because of lack of money in the last 12 months.”³

Today, across the country, supermarkets, health food stores and urban farmers’ markets are beacons of gentrification that perpetuate wealth inequality, social exclusion and food capitalism. Most plainly, most overlooked, these institutions illustrate the commodification of living beings (plants, animals and the microbes, yeasts and moulds used in their fermentation) materialising as ephemeral items on shelves, in fridges or crates. Though ingredient origin is more clearly communicated than ever before, there is still a gaping disconnect between what the consumer sees and the enormous amounts of labour, water and fossil fuels each product requires to reach their homes. In some ways our right to food is purposefully and politically suffixed with by any means necessary in order to purposely obfuscate the extent of human toil and soil extraction that occurs on farms and in factories around the world.

As well as the economic and ecological strain on society and nature respectively, these arenas also provide a fertile growing medium for bourgeois gatekeeping of products that pertain to be ‘free range’, ‘organic’ or ‘wild’, reinforcing class boundaries and restricting access to marginalised communities that live in the locale. Food shopping, when viewing London’s farmers’ markets through a cultural lens, can be painted as a leisure event; a Saturday morning family/hangover excursion fuelled by coffee and cronuts. The middle class dominance of these spaces is analogous with the liberal expectations of servitude and frivolity at the cost of others. Prices comfortably honoured by the primary audience, in addition to weights, nomenclature and jargon specific to each vendor, are hugely dissuasive to many. I’ve backed out –last minute and on multiple occasions– from buying something due to confusion or indecisiveness or lack of money. And I was ashamed of my own inadequacies. So why can’t we all shop there? And why is a naked cauliflower grown without chemicals just outside the city more expensive than one flown over from the Netherlands, covered in toxic pesticides and plastic? What’s the other option?

Over time supermarkets have created a perfect triplex for contemporary food attitudes to reign – Choice, Convenience and Luxury. I’m certain we are all experiencing Supermarket Stockholm Syndrome as a result. Trapped in this abusive system we have been forced to love, the vast socio-economic power these organisations wield is skilfully utilised to hide the constant threat of restricting access to our basic needs. This learned dependency on our aggressor has coaxed the general public into tolerance, and in some cases a demand for low-cost and processed foods that are often devoid of nutritional value. Bleached bread, reconstituted meats and microwave meals, each contain countless chemicals and preservatives to prolong the shelf-life while retaining the aesthetic appearance of edibility. Behind all the packaging adorned in advertising greenwash, remains the fact that a large part of a working person’s diet is stuffed with preservatives (like benzoates and sulphites) and E numbers (like colourants and emulsifiers), without their consent.

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Truthfully, my income suggests I too should be shopping exclusively in supermarkets – but I gave it up almost a decade ago. This boycott is expensive and inconvenient, however, similar to when I quit smoking a few years ago, I made the choice instinctively and figured out how to deal with it afterwards. I will also admit that it is uncomfortable to write critically about this subject, as for many it’s an inescapable daily reality, and I want this argument to acknowledge my own position. I am privileged enough to have educated myself out of the food trap and although challenging the systemic violence through writing is not a guaranteed resolution, by staying silent I feel I am only reinforcing the alienation many experience as the Government continues to demonise and penalise working families in poverty for simply existing.

Rather than a complete overhaul of my old habits in one go, I have had to reckon with different aspects of my behaviour over a number of years, and it is still ongoing. By noticing and reducing my own unconscious consumption, my living costs have significantly dropped, which has meant I can work a little less and spend more time nourishing myself and others. I have also brought food to the forefront of my professional arts practice. Sharing research through workshops, meals and performances has made space inside cultural institutions for conversations and flavours to be isolated and interrogated in a way that doesn’t appear in the everyday. I’ve been inspired by working on urban community gardens, market projects and rural organic farms, learning how to grow, tend and harvest crops, and process or preserve fresh ingredients in bulk. Knowing what I know, it’s now my responsibility to support these models that respect workers, cut out unnecessary agents, and regenerate soil whenever and wherever I can.

Any form of counter-cultural or anticapitalist work is inherently energy-sapping, so incremental and intentional steps have been necessary for me. It has become a primary aim of mine to deeply transform every aspect of my relationship with food, to critically engage on a daily basis, create discourse through my art practice and sidestep the boobytraps that capitalism lays out along the way. The predominant changes I’ve made are: using independent stores, buying dry organic wholefoods, foraging wild and seasonally, scavenging urban surpluses and raiding bins, fermenting all my fresh leftovers, and cutting meat out of my diet almost entirely. Cooking too much food on purpose, taking a packed lunch everywhere, buying a dehydrator, and composting my scraps – I am actively trying to become a bad consumer – to divorce my lazy ego, to flush away the grab-and-go mentality, to squeeze the obedience from my body, to defy the purpose I’ve been assigned.

In fundamentally reassessing the way I acquire, process and discard ingredients, I have weaned myself off of food capitalism and have saved a huge amount of money in the long term. Fortunately I can attribute this exploration to time I’ve spent thinking and reading and practising, time that I can afford to spend because of my education, employment and lack of dependents. Perhaps I’m healing my inner child through the gut?

I have also collaborated in local and national food justice projects which both tackle issues head-on and advocate for wider cultural shifts. From 2018-2020 I ran Brixton Pound Cafe, a pay-what-you-can community cafe using food intercepted from landfill by Fareshare and City Harvest. We prepared simple vegetarian and vegan meals, catered local commercial events, held cooking workshops with organisations like Migrateful, and hosted DIY events like book launches and fundraiser parties. Since 2019 I have also been organising with National Food Service (NFS), a network of autonomous social eating spaces supporting local projects such as community cook training, film screenings and supper clubs. Last year I co-wrote and designed a practical, educational and critical handbook with NFS London, which was distributed to new and existing community kitchens across the UK, to encourage neighbourhood food solidarity in the style of Cooperative Towns. In-person courses based on the resource are also still being taught out of Hackney Borough.

Currently I live in an experimental co-living project in Derbyshire, where I have organised a communal pantry and co-ordinate the purchasing of bulk dry store ingredients like grains, beans and spices. We also collect a donation of blemished and surplus fruit and veg from a local organic farm every week, which gets cooked into fresh house meals or preserved as pickles, jams and seasonings. Through the everyday practice of preparing, cooking and preserving with each other —and guests— we are bringing awareness to the hidden infrastructure of communality and strengthening our interpersonal bonds.

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I recall the first time I read Baudrillard at university. I think it was ‘Hyperreality’ that crystallised the bodily sensation I experienced entering a hotel, supermarket or motorway service station: temporal and spatial confusion, sensitivity to day-glo lighting, the rigidity and flimsiness of architecture. These places or “non-places” he discussed, were akin to the way I saw my hometown. Looking back, that was likely my first conscious acknowledgement of neoliberalism in suburbia, and the foundation of my understanding of cultural hegemony.

In the UK there is an addiction to frequenting recognisable ‘to-go’ city shops or driving to enormous out-of-town supermarkets rather than walking to our local independent vendor. The branding and familiarity of these organisations have become so ingrained in our daily lives, backed up by their ability to afford to buy up cheap land. Under monopoly and shrewd marketing tactics, they have not only gained the trust of their customers, but managed to plant a seed of doubt should they come across a competitor. The once intimate and friendly marketplaces have been transformed into cold, highly privatised zones that benefit from shoppers’ on-the-move lifestyles and time scarcity. Is the system broken or was it designed this way?

In her essay on social eating, I Dream of Canteens, Rebecca May Johnson states “The government allows effective starvation to proliferate without lifting a finger.”⁴This was exemplified in 2020 when the government voted down a motion to give children free school meals over half-term and into winter, so it was left to Marcus Rashford, a professional footballer who grew up on these free school meals, to instigate a nationwide campaign to ensure the nation’s kids got fed. Currently, with the ‘Cost of Living Crisis’ catalysed by the repeated gutting of local services and funding, and the syphoning of fuel company profits into shareholders pockets, the Government are avoiding their responsibility of ensuring survival (and care) of its population, many of whom are faced with deciding between “heating or eating” this winter.

This is no longer a political argument, but a moral one. Capitalism is how we rationalise the business logic that one should profit from another’s misery or hardship. Gargi Bhattacharyya observes in a 2021 video that it’s “as if we do not have a right to the means of life because the market trumps it.”⁵ MPs defend their vote by claiming food poverty should incentivise parents to work harder, and that the treasury cannot afford the £120m to put food on the tables of struggling households (which makes up 20% of the population). Meanwhile, the same MPs who were given a £2k pay rise earlier this year are still eating meals in Parliament subsidised by taxpayers’ money, while continuing to keep working people’s needs just out of reach.⁶

We are inside a circus tent falling down in slow motion. Commodification of just-in-time food is a bleak tragedy of neoliberalism, yet we’ve been hoodwinked into believing there is no other way. The endless extraction of resources –minerals from the soil, oil from the earth’s crust, labour from the producers of all this stuff– is a false necessity for contemporary hoarding.

I cannot possibly describe the nuances of this hellscape, so I feel extremely grateful that writers like Rebecca May Johnson, Ash Sarkar, Nosheen Iqbal and Jonathan Nunn are all putting the hard work into deciphering the mess and laying accountability at the appropriate individual’s feet. Organisations such as Land In Our Names (LION) and Landworkers’ Alliance (LWA) are working tirelessly on-the-ground, educating their members on the global proletariat struggle against industrialisation and racialised land grabbing, while nurturing a new generation of growers, cooks and activists who centre food sovereignty.

The fight for food sovereignty – how communities are primary stakeholders in the production, trading and consumption of their food – is the fight for people and the environment, and against corporate monopoly. By virtue, all of my desires and all of yours are interconnected. Our fragmented ideas are weak when separated, and strong when collectivised. We must in part take responsibility for the inequalities we perpetuate, and search out more equitable models that protect the most vulnerable members of our society.

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